"What's Our ARR?" Should Not Be a 3-Hour Research Project
Your board meeting is tomorrow. Your investor asks a simple question: "What's your ARR right now, and how does it compare to last quarter?"
You open Stripe. Then HubSpot. Then Xero. Then that spreadsheet your finance analyst maintains. The numbers... don't quite match. Stripe shows payment volume. HubSpot shows bookings. Xero shows revenue recognition. Your spreadsheet shows something in between.
So you do what every finance team does: manually reconcile. Pull closed deals from HubSpot. Cross-reference with Stripe payments. Check Xero for revenue recognition timing. Adjust for that enterprise customer who paid annually versus monthly subscribers. Account for expansions. Back out churned accounts. Factor in failed payments that haven't processed yet.
Three hours later, you have a number. Probably. You're 80% confident it's accurate. Maybe 70%.
And that's just current ARR. Your investor also asked about last quarter. So you dig through historical data, try to remember which deals closed when, reconstruct what churn looked like three months ago, and... honestly, you're guessing.
Turns out, "What's our ARR?" isn't a simple question when your finance metrics live in four different systems that don't talk to each other.
The Scattered Data Problem
Here's what finance teams actually deal with:
Payments live in Stripe. You can see transaction volume, failed charges, upcoming invoices. But Stripe doesn't know about the enterprise deal that closed but hasn't invoiced yet.
Deals live in HubSpot. You can see closed-won, pipeline, deal stages. But HubSpot doesn't know about the payment that just failed or the customer who quietly downgraded.
Revenue recognition lives in Xero. You can see what's been invoiced and collected. But Xero doesn't know about expansion opportunities or which renewals are at risk.
And ARR? That critical metric your entire business runs on? That lives in someone's head, or a spreadsheet that's two weeks out of date, or three different dashboards that each tell a slightly different story.
So you can't answer basic questions without a research project:
- "Which customers are having payment issues?" (Check Stripe, cross-reference with HubSpot)
- "Why did net new ARR drop last month?" (Was it churn? Contraction? Slower new business? Who knows?)
- "What's our revenue trend over the past six months?" (Let me rebuild that from scratch)
Your revenue team closed $500K in deals last month. Great. But $80K in payments failed. And $120K churned. And two enterprise customers downgraded. Net new ARR is... you'll get back to them.
Meanwhile, your CFO is making budget decisions based on incomplete data. Your revenue team is celebrating bookings that might not turn into cash. And your CS team doesn't know which accounts are having billing issues until they've already churned.
Same company, completely different versions of financial reality.
What If Finance Metrics Actually Lived Together?
Count's unified finance canvas brings Stripe, HubSpot, and Xero data into one place—with actual metric trees that show how everything connects.
Total ARR at the top. Net new ARR beneath it. Net new breaking down into new ARR, expansion, contraction, and churn. New business, renewals, and churn tracked separately. Upcoming billing, overdue invoices, and failed payments all visible in context.
Which is a fancy way of saying: you can finally answer "What's our ARR?" in under 30 seconds instead of three hours.
This is based on how Count brings data together internally—Stripe payments and invoices through Xero, connected with HubSpot CRM data. All the pieces that normally live in isolation, now in one canvas with the metric tree showing exactly how they relate.
Your finance analyst can drill into line-level table data to investigate discrepancies. Your CFO can see high-level visualizations for board reporting. Your CS team can spot customers with failed payments before they churn. Everyone's looking at the same numbers, updated automatically, no manual reconciliation required.
And because it's a canvas, your team can actually collaborate on the numbers. Your revenue ops lead spots deal slippage and drops a comment: "Three enterprise deals pushed to next quarter—net new ARR will miss target." Your finance analyst notices expansion trending down and starts a discussion thread. Your CFO sets up an alert: email the leadership team at month-end with the complete finance picture, or ping Slack when ARR drops below threshold.
Instant alerts. Real-time monitoring. Detailed analysis for teams who need it, executive dashboards for leadership who don't want to see every transaction.
Done.
From Reconciliation Hell to Revenue Intelligence
Here's what changes when your finance metrics are unified:
Month-end close gets faster. No more manually stitching together data from three systems. The numbers are already there, already reconciled, already accurate.
You prevent issues instead of reacting to them. See failed payments before they cause churn. Spot contraction trends before they crater net new ARR. Identify deal slippage before quarter-end.
Historical comparisons actually work. "What was our ARR six months ago?" isn't a research project anymore. It's right there, in the same canvas, with the same metric tree structure you're using today.
The reality is: your finance data exists. Stripe has it. HubSpot has it. Xero has it. But having data scattered across systems isn't the same as having financial intelligence.
ARR is a simple concept. New business grows it. Expansion grows it. Contraction shrinks it. Churn shrinks it. Net new ARR is the result. Total ARR is what you're actually worth.
Build your finance metric tree once. Connect your payment processor, your CRM, your accounting system. Let your team monitor it in real time, collaborate on issues, and set alerts for problems before they compound.
And finally answer "What's our ARR?" with confidence instead of guesswork.